This five-hundred-page book provides a comprehensive, well-researched, and definitive medical history of childbirth in nineteenth-century Chile. Zárate examines physicians’ increasing interest in the female body and childbirth and their increasing, if always limited, control over labor and delivery. In the early republican era, where Zárate’s story begins in earnest, medicine itself was not a well-regulated or well-defined profession. But in 1834 physicians codified procedures for their own training and licensing and began to insist that only they attend to difficult births and to assert control over the schooling of midwives. They set up a first school for midwives in 1834, and the protomedicato (medical college) subsequently examined and licensed midwives. With the passage of an 1866 law requiring midwives to obtain licenses, physicians and their “obstetrical science” further encroached on midwives’ “ciencia de hembra.”
As Zárate points out, the process whereby physicians asserted control over childbirth was part...